Warm weather sharpens the eye for spotting wild flowers

As I drove north out of Allentown on Route 476, the turnpike, one day last week it didn't take long to feel like I had left the city and suburbia behind.

Kathy Sieminski and I were on our way to Frances Slocum State Park in Luzerne County above Wilkes-Barre because I have a hummingbird program scheduled there in July and I wanted to see where I'd be speaking.

Along the road, black locust trees were blooming and pieces of their spent white petals were blowing in the hot, humid wind. This was the first really uncomfortable day of spring. It was one of those days when, if you were outside, sweating was synonymous with breathing.

This 1,035-acre state park with a big well-fished lake is named for a woman who was taken from that area as a little girl by the Delaware Indians. Her brothers found her 59 years later living on a reservation in Indiana, but by then she had been married twice, had four children and had no desire to leave.

The amphitheater there is under the tree canopy, so after checking it out we explored the surrounding area. Pink pinxter flowers (Rhododendron nudiflorum), or native wild azaleas, were blooming at a few spots in the understory, and the ground beneath them was populated by countless dwarf ginseng plants. But growing along a nearby trail cut through the trees were many other wildflowers.

Probably the most interesting were the fringed polygalas, commonly called gaywings, although you had to look close to the ground to see them. They look like small orchids, but they're not. They're members of the milkwort family whose dark pink flowers are sometimes described as looking like tailless airplanes.

Behind a front pink crest the flowers have a white sack that, when landed on by a pollinator, shoots up pollen through a slit. It used to be thought that if nursing mothers or cows ate these flowers their milk production would increase, although I'm guessing that that belief is long gone.

Surrounding the gaywings and more abundant were blooming wild geraniums, sometimes called cranesbills because of their shape. Wild geraniums don't look much like the compound and often deep red flowers of the hybrid geraniums available just about everywhere plants are sold. The wild ones have simple-shaped lavender flowers with five petals.

The hot weather of that day seemed even worse when I got home in late afternoon, and it continued right into darkness. The valley that night was filled with the trilling, attractant calls of American toads, and they were especially loud in our son's pond across from our home.

Toads like shallow water, and several of them were lined up along the pond's edge with their vibrating throat sacs puffed up. The competition for females to mate with was at a high pitch that got even louder whenever two of them got within inches of each other.

One particularly small male seemed to be the loudest and he chased every other one away from his spot. And every once in a while he would chirp, making him sound more like an insect than a toad.